2. Defeat platform impediments It is the tendency of platforms to present themselves as omniscient. They never are. The game used to be that you owned all the data yourself, but, because so many interactions are on platforms you do not control, marketers lose visibility into the lives of their customers. And that upsets marketers. Yes, powerful platforms can do amazing things. You can learn incredible things about consumers from Facebook; it’s probably the world’s largest database. Putting that insight into practice is no small task. Customers expect brands to know them when they want to be known and to be anonymous when they don’t. Gathering and analyzing all the internal and external data requires – at this moment at least – an intensely complicated marketing technology stack, and no one piece of software can address it all. The problem with platforms and marketing technology is that they, and the marketers who use them, see data analysis as a technology, not creative strategy. Marketers use a small fraction of the potential of their technology because changing the organization to make use of the insights they generate is hard, even if buying some new shiny toy is easy. 3. Distinguish between measurement and effectiveness My late colleague Tim Broadbent used to remind us of the old story of the surgeon who said the operation had been a success, but, unfortunately, the patient had died. That surgeon was a measurement culture man. He may have carried out the procedure in the approved manner, but measuring the connections of the process do not help if the end result goes wrong. Data is dangerously prone to creating measurement cultures. But what we really need is effectiveness culture. A measurement culture is obsessed by process; while an effectiveness culture is obsessed by results. A measurement culture focuses on ticking the right boxes; while an effectiveness culture focuses on doing the right things. Measurement cultures look to the past – “How well did we work?” Effectiveness cultures look to the future – “How can we do better next time?” “A measurement culture is obsessed by process; while an effectiveness culture is obsessed by results.”